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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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As I said, they failed, utterly. Their protests fell on deaf ears and the academy became more and more exclusive of any opposing views. It turns out that a key part of enforcing ones free speech rights is force.

Oh ok, are you gonna use force to start enforcing free speech rights being targeted by the government now?

Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?

This overall topic is about who the democratically elected government chooses to spend money on. Even if you consider free speech dependent on federal subsidy, which would be wildly at odds with the premise of natural rights, there are always people not getting money. There have always been conditions for getting the money. These incudes the previous administration's insistence on DEI-support speech in applications and proposals, the reversal of which is the basis of the OP's quoted objection.

Organizations like FIRE are a great resource to find ongoing attacks against free speech and free expression by government https://www.thefire.org/

For example the most recent one in the "cumulative theory of harassment" https://www.thefire.org/news/findings-against-harvard-are-blueprint-national-campus-speech-code and the censorship of legal anti-semitic speech.

Another problem with the cumulative theory of harassment is that it holds current speakers responsible for creating a “hostile environment” based on the previous statements and activities of people to whom they may be entirely unrelated. This means anyone can find themselves in the position of perpetrator of hostile environment harassment without himself or herself actually engaging in harassing behavior.

Consider, for example, the following account said to “highlight the hostile environment created for Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard,” according to HHS:

On May 12, 2024, a crudely drawn image of Interim President Garber was also displayed [during an encampment protest] depicting him as a devil with horns and a tail, recalling “medieval antisemitic tropes of Jews as Satan’s minions.

Like posting a political cartoon to Instagram, simply displaying such a picture simply cannot be deemed harassment by any rational measure, let alone be taken as serious enough to deny the person seeing it “equal access to an educational program or activity.” The Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education established the standard for peer harassment under Title IX, holding schools liable only when they are deliberately indifferent to harassment that is severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and even warns of “the amount of litigation that would be invited by entertaining claims of official indifference to a single instance of one-on-one peer harassment.”

Under the cumulative theory of harassment, that’s out the window. A school like Harvard must consider each individual student’s choice to display this picture as part of a pattern of behavior that consists of everything everyone else is doing on campus during some undefined period of time, whether or not the student knew anything about it.

As they conclude

Real discrimination deserves a real response. True threats, vandalism, and violence are not protected speech and schools should act when they occur. But they must do so with the precision the Constitution requires — punishing conduct, not ideas, and respecting the robust political debate that higher education exists to nurture.

Harvard’s case should be a warning. Unless we properly respect the line between speech and misconduct, Title VI risks becoming not a shield against injustice, but a sword for enforcing the orthodoxy favored by whatever political forces wield it, now or in the future.

You avoided the question, since you did not identify what free speech right is now being targeted by the government by the government not providing monetary grants.

The government was already- as in, for decades pre-Trump- using Title IX against universities for what individuals were doing. This has repeatedly withstood the scrutiny of courts, bipartisan elected official review, and even the approval of academics like Terence Tao. Your own citation concedes that 'Real discrimination deserves a real response,' it merely quibbles what [real discrimination] should be bounded at, while presenting a false dilemma that has already come to pass.

You avoided the question, since you did not identify what free speech right is now being targeted by the government by the government not providing monetary grants.

No you asked "Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?"

I gave you a link to a FIRE article going over one of them. You don't get to change your question now because you don't like the answer.

I also gave you the elaboration paragraph, which you did and still ignore.

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